There was a very strange moment in Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
The Supreme Court nominee said she had been inspired to become a prosecutor by Hamilton Burger, the fictional District Attorney character in the old Perry Mason TV show.
Sotomayor told Democrat Senator Amy Klobucher of Minnesota that she first knew she wanted to be a prosecutor while watching the TV show “Perry Mason” as a child.
She recalled that at the end of one case, after another of Mason’s clients had been proven innocent of Burger’s trumped-up charges, “Perry said to the prosecutor, ‘It must cause you some pain having expended all that effort and to have the charges dismissed.’
“And the prosecutor looked up and said, ‘No, my job as a prosecutor is to do justice, and justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not.’ And I thought to myself, that’s quite amazing, to be able to serve that role.”
“My point,” she added, “is that it is such a wonderful part of being a prosecutor…That TV character said something that motivated my choices in life.”
In the words of Hamilton Burger, “We object.”
The Hamilton Burger character appeared in 207 episodes of the old Perry Mason TV show. He was consistently wrong, gleefully prosecuting innocent people in 206 of those programs. In the 207th episode, “The Case of the Deadly Verdict” Mason was eventually able to prove that his client has been wrong convicted and the worked tirelessly to have the decision overturned.
We would have been far more impressed if she said she had been inspired by the Perry Mason character – the rich, successful attorney who frequently worked without payment to see that justice was done. Instead, Sotomayor was inspired by the character who enthusiastically prosecuted innocent people week after week for ten years.
But it certainly helps explain why the Supreme Court has overturned so many of Sotomayor’s decisions.
Let’s just call it “The Case of the Leftist Latina.”
Source: Los Angeles Times
